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The Xenophobe's Guide
The Xenophobe's Guide to the Japanese
Highlights the unique character and behavior of the nation. Frank, irreverent, funny--almost guaranteed to cure Xenophobia.
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First published January 1, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
June 5, 2020
It took me quite a while to finish this book even though it is so short because I really tried to learn and remember things. I’ve only been to Japan once and would love to go there again. This book reminded me so much of the funny incidents that happened during our visit to Japan, it made me laugh out loud.
November 2, 2019
I have now read twenty books in the Xenophobes' Guide series, which are usually very good. This one is by far the most disappointing and utterly inaccurate one I have read. I have painstakingly written down the most aberrant passages and explained why they are wrong. I had to abridge my original list though.
- p.5 "a foreigner who speaks Japanese and shows appreciation of Japanese culture is dubbed henna gaijin (weird foreigner)"
I have heard the Japanese use the term 'henna gaijin' for people who behaved very differently from them or did not respect Japanese etiquette, but never for someone who showed appreciation for Japanese culture.
- p.6 "for a woman to be thought of as opinionated is worse than being called ugly."
This may be one of the authors' personal experience, but it is not something with which a lot of Japanese would agree. Japanese women are well known for making all the important decisions within the household, and they are becoming increasingly assertive at work too. In the younger generation, women often have more character and stronger opinions than men.
- p.15 "they refer to rice as go-han (honourable rice)".
This is a terrible mistranslation. The prefix 'go-' is just used to soften nouns, a bit like a substitute to the articles in European languages. Therefore 'go-han' only means 'the rice', certainly not 'honourable rice'.
- p.18 "The reason for the [business] cards is to establish the social status the other person has (they aren't able to tell from the outward appearance, of course, as they all wear identical suits)."
It is confusing to talk about social status here, when all Japanese 'salarymen' would consider themselves middle class. Like everywhere else business cards are meant to determine the other person's rank in the company. It is very different from social status, as it is only within the company and not society as a whole. It is also wrong to say that we can't guess a person's position in a company from their appearance. Top managers will almost always wear expensive brand suits (even Japanese men are brand addicts), which ordinary employees won't be able to afford, or in any case won't wear at work so as not to look better than their bosses, which could cause a loss of face. I wonder if any of the four authors has actually worked in a Japanese company.
- p.19 "The Japanese are hopeless timekeepers outside of business and will often turn up to meet you at the station an hour or two late."
This is one of the book's most shockingly wrong statement. The Japanese are almost always on time, even when meeting friends, and will often call you to apologise even if they are only five minutes late.
- p.22 "A gift of two kilos of butter wrapped in department store paper will be far more prized than a gold watch in a paper bag."
Did anybody actually proofread that book before it was published ? What kind of statement is that ? I defy them to launch a large-scale survey and find more than 1% of Japanese who agree with that.
- p.24 "You need never read the timetable because trains in Japan are frequent and scarcely ever late."
This sentence doesn't make any sense. It is true that Japanese trains are punctual, and this is why timetables are useful. If trains were constantly late (like in Italy), timetables would be useless.
- p.24 "Nearly all tickets are sold from machines, but as place names are so difficult to read that often the only people who will understand them are the locals".
More nonsense. Chinese characters for Japanese place names, just like for surnames, are almost always very basic topographic characters like 'mountain', 'forest' or 'rice field' or simple adjectives like 'big', 'small', 'long'...
- p.25 "Commuters trains in Japan are full of men in bluish suits and spectacles, tightly squeezed because porters push people on board to make sure they are running nicely full."
This sentence comes just after the statement that Japanese stations have constant announcements such as 'Please don't try to board a train which is full'. Find the mistake.
- p.38 "much of it is based on freshly caught raw fish, such as Odori-ebi, which means 'dancing prawns'."
Since when are prawns a kind of raw fish ?
- p.38 "by contrast, meat is tasteless and fatty."
It is true that the Japanese like fatty meat (and fish), but saying that it is tasteless is an affront to Japanese cuisine, which is among the best in the world. It's hard to find tastier meat than the Japanese yakitori or yakiniku (even if the latter is of Korean origin).
- p.52 "This explains why there seems to be only five or six surnames in Japan".
Aren't the authors confusing Japan with China or Vietnam ? There over 100,000 different surnames in use in Japan, more than in almost any other language groups on Earth (except notably English, French and Italian).
- p.58 "Unless it is of the aseptic variety, you don't grab hold of the office computer mouse directly. You first wrap your own germ-free handkerchief round it, and only then are you ready to get on with clicking."
=> Another grossly unrepresentative example. If anybody does that, they are rare special cases. By no means is that the way most Japanese behave. It would be like saying the British people keep exotic animals like tigers or crocodiles in their house. There may be a few, but these are extremely rare and totally out of place in a book about the country's culture.
- p.59 "[about Japanese toilets] Such state-of-the-art devices are installed in most Japanese homes these days. As a result, children tend to shy away from the old-fashioned low-tech variety still found in schools, let alone the fossil-age monstrosities above which you have to hover."
Ironic that the 'fossil-age monstrosities' in question are always referred to as 'Wafu' (Japanese-style) toilets as opposed to the 'Youfu' (Western-style) bowl toilets in public lavatories. The truth is that squat toilets are still the most common variety in public places in Japan, even in chic Ginza department stores.
- p.60 "Japan's pharmaceutical market is one of the biggest in the world, second only to that of the U.S.A."
Obviously since Japan is the world's second largest developed economy. The same could be said of most sectors. That isn't an argument to explain the long Japanese life expectancy. Per capita figures would be far more interesting. It is disconcerting that the two Japanese authors are economists but couldn't see that.
- p.61 "Going to onsen, hot springs, was the traditional cure - when the Japanese were not quite so busy. The privileged few still do."
Privileged few ? What Japanese hasn't been to an onsen ? It is one of their favourite activities on weekends and national holidays.
- p.65 "Japan numbers years according to the reign of the Emperor. 2010 therefore is only 'Heisei 22' - the 22nd year of Akihito. Such things do not bother the individual Japanese, whose first year is called 'year one'. Under this system babies are born at the age of one, and another year is added every January 1st. Hence a baby born on December 31st becomes two on January 1st, a day later."
Another confirmation of the shocking ignorance of the authors about Japanese culture. There are three serious factual errors here. The system of being born at age one, and having one's birthday on New Year Day has been completely obsolete since the late 19th century. Nobody uses that anymore. Secondly, in this traditional system people never had their birthday on 1st January, because the New Year didn't fall on 1st January, but on the same day as the Chinese New Year, following the lunar calendar and therefore different each year. Thirdly, the Japanese now use the Western calendar. The tradition of counting the years from the beginning of the emperor's reign still exists, but is the most Japanese count in Western years and often have to think carefully about or ask what the traditional year is. The book is highly misleading because it doesn't explain any of this.
- p.70 "O-Bon (late July/early August)".
They can't even get the dates right for the most important traditional holiday of the year. O-Bon falls exactly on 15th August and is a national holiday.
- p.75 "Schools offer a range of extra-curricular sports - baseball, soccer, basketball, tennis, table tennis, skiing,, judo, karate, kendo - but they are not for enjoyment. They are to build character, to learn about discipline and obedience."
Aside from the fact that skiing isn't exactly common in Japanese schools, how do sports like tennis or table tennis teach about discipline and obedience ?
- p.82 "The Japanese language is rated as the world's hardest to master."
Really ? It has much less characters than Chinese, and Japanese has a very basic grammar compared to European languages: no conjugation, no declension, no article, no gender, few tenses, few irregularities, flexible sentence structure, easy pronuciation...
- p.85 "Japanese characters (kanji) were adopted from China. There are 50,000 of them."
That's why they are calle Chinese characters. Japanese characters aren't the kanji, but the hiragana and katakana scripts. There are 50,000 Chinese characters in China, but only some 6,000 were imported into Japanese. So it is wrong to say that there are 50,000 kanji, since kanji is the term for those used in Japanese only.
Your best bet if you want to learn about the basics of Japanese culture and society is still to buy a real guide book like Lonely Planet Japan or the Rough Guide to Japan. Their context section covers most of what you will find in this book, but without the blatant mistakes.
- p.5 "a foreigner who speaks Japanese and shows appreciation of Japanese culture is dubbed henna gaijin (weird foreigner)"
I have heard the Japanese use the term 'henna gaijin' for people who behaved very differently from them or did not respect Japanese etiquette, but never for someone who showed appreciation for Japanese culture.
- p.6 "for a woman to be thought of as opinionated is worse than being called ugly."
This may be one of the authors' personal experience, but it is not something with which a lot of Japanese would agree. Japanese women are well known for making all the important decisions within the household, and they are becoming increasingly assertive at work too. In the younger generation, women often have more character and stronger opinions than men.
- p.15 "they refer to rice as go-han (honourable rice)".
This is a terrible mistranslation. The prefix 'go-' is just used to soften nouns, a bit like a substitute to the articles in European languages. Therefore 'go-han' only means 'the rice', certainly not 'honourable rice'.
- p.18 "The reason for the [business] cards is to establish the social status the other person has (they aren't able to tell from the outward appearance, of course, as they all wear identical suits)."
It is confusing to talk about social status here, when all Japanese 'salarymen' would consider themselves middle class. Like everywhere else business cards are meant to determine the other person's rank in the company. It is very different from social status, as it is only within the company and not society as a whole. It is also wrong to say that we can't guess a person's position in a company from their appearance. Top managers will almost always wear expensive brand suits (even Japanese men are brand addicts), which ordinary employees won't be able to afford, or in any case won't wear at work so as not to look better than their bosses, which could cause a loss of face. I wonder if any of the four authors has actually worked in a Japanese company.
- p.19 "The Japanese are hopeless timekeepers outside of business and will often turn up to meet you at the station an hour or two late."
This is one of the book's most shockingly wrong statement. The Japanese are almost always on time, even when meeting friends, and will often call you to apologise even if they are only five minutes late.
- p.22 "A gift of two kilos of butter wrapped in department store paper will be far more prized than a gold watch in a paper bag."
Did anybody actually proofread that book before it was published ? What kind of statement is that ? I defy them to launch a large-scale survey and find more than 1% of Japanese who agree with that.
- p.24 "You need never read the timetable because trains in Japan are frequent and scarcely ever late."
This sentence doesn't make any sense. It is true that Japanese trains are punctual, and this is why timetables are useful. If trains were constantly late (like in Italy), timetables would be useless.
- p.24 "Nearly all tickets are sold from machines, but as place names are so difficult to read that often the only people who will understand them are the locals".
More nonsense. Chinese characters for Japanese place names, just like for surnames, are almost always very basic topographic characters like 'mountain', 'forest' or 'rice field' or simple adjectives like 'big', 'small', 'long'...
- p.25 "Commuters trains in Japan are full of men in bluish suits and spectacles, tightly squeezed because porters push people on board to make sure they are running nicely full."
This sentence comes just after the statement that Japanese stations have constant announcements such as 'Please don't try to board a train which is full'. Find the mistake.
- p.38 "much of it is based on freshly caught raw fish, such as Odori-ebi, which means 'dancing prawns'."
Since when are prawns a kind of raw fish ?
- p.38 "by contrast, meat is tasteless and fatty."
It is true that the Japanese like fatty meat (and fish), but saying that it is tasteless is an affront to Japanese cuisine, which is among the best in the world. It's hard to find tastier meat than the Japanese yakitori or yakiniku (even if the latter is of Korean origin).
- p.52 "This explains why there seems to be only five or six surnames in Japan".
Aren't the authors confusing Japan with China or Vietnam ? There over 100,000 different surnames in use in Japan, more than in almost any other language groups on Earth (except notably English, French and Italian).
- p.58 "Unless it is of the aseptic variety, you don't grab hold of the office computer mouse directly. You first wrap your own germ-free handkerchief round it, and only then are you ready to get on with clicking."
=> Another grossly unrepresentative example. If anybody does that, they are rare special cases. By no means is that the way most Japanese behave. It would be like saying the British people keep exotic animals like tigers or crocodiles in their house. There may be a few, but these are extremely rare and totally out of place in a book about the country's culture.
- p.59 "[about Japanese toilets] Such state-of-the-art devices are installed in most Japanese homes these days. As a result, children tend to shy away from the old-fashioned low-tech variety still found in schools, let alone the fossil-age monstrosities above which you have to hover."
Ironic that the 'fossil-age monstrosities' in question are always referred to as 'Wafu' (Japanese-style) toilets as opposed to the 'Youfu' (Western-style) bowl toilets in public lavatories. The truth is that squat toilets are still the most common variety in public places in Japan, even in chic Ginza department stores.
- p.60 "Japan's pharmaceutical market is one of the biggest in the world, second only to that of the U.S.A."
Obviously since Japan is the world's second largest developed economy. The same could be said of most sectors. That isn't an argument to explain the long Japanese life expectancy. Per capita figures would be far more interesting. It is disconcerting that the two Japanese authors are economists but couldn't see that.
- p.61 "Going to onsen, hot springs, was the traditional cure - when the Japanese were not quite so busy. The privileged few still do."
Privileged few ? What Japanese hasn't been to an onsen ? It is one of their favourite activities on weekends and national holidays.
- p.65 "Japan numbers years according to the reign of the Emperor. 2010 therefore is only 'Heisei 22' - the 22nd year of Akihito. Such things do not bother the individual Japanese, whose first year is called 'year one'. Under this system babies are born at the age of one, and another year is added every January 1st. Hence a baby born on December 31st becomes two on January 1st, a day later."
Another confirmation of the shocking ignorance of the authors about Japanese culture. There are three serious factual errors here. The system of being born at age one, and having one's birthday on New Year Day has been completely obsolete since the late 19th century. Nobody uses that anymore. Secondly, in this traditional system people never had their birthday on 1st January, because the New Year didn't fall on 1st January, but on the same day as the Chinese New Year, following the lunar calendar and therefore different each year. Thirdly, the Japanese now use the Western calendar. The tradition of counting the years from the beginning of the emperor's reign still exists, but is the most Japanese count in Western years and often have to think carefully about or ask what the traditional year is. The book is highly misleading because it doesn't explain any of this.
- p.70 "O-Bon (late July/early August)".
They can't even get the dates right for the most important traditional holiday of the year. O-Bon falls exactly on 15th August and is a national holiday.
- p.75 "Schools offer a range of extra-curricular sports - baseball, soccer, basketball, tennis, table tennis, skiing,, judo, karate, kendo - but they are not for enjoyment. They are to build character, to learn about discipline and obedience."
Aside from the fact that skiing isn't exactly common in Japanese schools, how do sports like tennis or table tennis teach about discipline and obedience ?
- p.82 "The Japanese language is rated as the world's hardest to master."
Really ? It has much less characters than Chinese, and Japanese has a very basic grammar compared to European languages: no conjugation, no declension, no article, no gender, few tenses, few irregularities, flexible sentence structure, easy pronuciation...
- p.85 "Japanese characters (kanji) were adopted from China. There are 50,000 of them."
That's why they are calle Chinese characters. Japanese characters aren't the kanji, but the hiragana and katakana scripts. There are 50,000 Chinese characters in China, but only some 6,000 were imported into Japanese. So it is wrong to say that there are 50,000 kanji, since kanji is the term for those used in Japanese only.
Your best bet if you want to learn about the basics of Japanese culture and society is still to buy a real guide book like Lonely Planet Japan or the Rough Guide to Japan. Their context section covers most of what you will find in this book, but without the blatant mistakes.
May 15, 2011
Foarte amuzantă, mai ales dacă ştii câte ceva despre japonezi. Mi-a plăcut mai ales capitolul despre caracter (p. 14) cu explicaţia termenului yoroshiku (p. 16).
December 2, 2017
Having lived in Japan for six years, I can say that this book is well researched, accurate and funny. It also made me miss Japan.
April 14, 2019
I am *so* ready for our second trip to Japan.
October 9, 2018
Before moving to Germany, reading the Xenophobe's Guides to Germans and also to Americans really helped us prepare, manage expectations, and plus I found them both hilarious. I don't understand what it is about this third one that made it less funny, it is very thorough and deliberate but it took me literally months to finish as I could only get through a few pages at a time and then let it sit around for ages before picking it up again. At times it seemed to be pulling punches; for example in the section on holidays they tell us "A total absence of biblical knowledge is no deterrent to young Japanese attending Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve". But while living in Tokyo for five years in the early 90s, I found it way funnier that Christmas Eve is the busiest day of the year for Love Hotels, that everybody books their rooms months in advance, and nobody knows why this romantic conflation exists.
May 8, 2016
I bought this slim little book in Japan on the recommendation of one of the people in the tour I went on. It's a funny little read and it does give you quite a bit of insight (slightly tongue in cheek) about why the Japanese are the way they are.
Having said that, some of the things in here are becoming old-fashioned. Aspects such as nose-blowing, not opening presents infront of people, saying grace before eating, not shovelling food straight out of the bowl into the mouth and so on are things that my generation (20s) just don't bother about nowadays.
But for anyone interested in Japan or going there, this is definately worth reading.
2016 note - review from my 2007 bookcrossing journal.
Having said that, some of the things in here are becoming old-fashioned. Aspects such as nose-blowing, not opening presents infront of people, saying grace before eating, not shovelling food straight out of the bowl into the mouth and so on are things that my generation (20s) just don't bother about nowadays.
But for anyone interested in Japan or going there, this is definately worth reading.
2016 note - review from my 2007 bookcrossing journal.
October 19, 2013
The Xenophobes books are always fun reads. Wanted to get a better idea of the culture my sister just moved into. ;)
June 12, 2016
fun read, like all guides of these series
March 2, 2015
SO FUNNY.
April 14, 2015
Useful Guide.
Easy reading.
Useful guide for those who plan to go to Japan.
The comparisons between Westerners and Japanese are an essential part of this guide.
Recommended!
Easy reading.
Useful guide for those who plan to go to Japan.
The comparisons between Westerners and Japanese are an essential part of this guide.
Recommended!
April 15, 2015
Not remotely a great book, but funny to those who have lived in the country, and unavoidably discomforting: Some generalizations ring true. So what do you make of those that don't?
October 8, 2015
Interesting and fun - recommended despite the title! Informative, as far as I can tell with my superficial knowledge of Japan.
February 24, 2016
3.5 stars. A funny and light guide to the quirks of Japan and its people.
August 13, 2016
Ok
Nothing special but interesting at moments. Heavily stereotypical and makes a lot of assumptions but enables foreigners to grasp a bit of the Japanese society.
Nothing special but interesting at moments. Heavily stereotypical and makes a lot of assumptions but enables foreigners to grasp a bit of the Japanese society.
September 18, 2016
Not to be taken entirely seriously, of course, but it's an entertaining and moderately informative quick read.
July 26, 2018
3.5 Sterne
Kurz und unterhaltsam... ist eher mit einem Augenzwinkern zu Lesen.
Kurz und unterhaltsam... ist eher mit einem Augenzwinkern zu Lesen.
July 26, 2018
#quickreads #fun #japan
June 30, 2023
This was printed in 1999 (got my copy from a professor at Kwansei Gakuin Daigaku) and I read this today in 2023.
Some of the things stated in this book, cultural/behavioral or otherwise material, are probably already untrue or becoming untrue. Most however are still applicable - often surprisingly so, thus it is astounding how slowly Japan changes - and made me LOL.
I love the tone of voice used by the writer; very matter-of-fact laced with passive aggressive sarcasms reminiscent of someone, perhaps a Japanese someone, who has had enough of Japan.
Some examples:
"Sex with high-school girls is in such demand that some older women dress up in school uniform."
"So it's probably best not to die in the final three months of the year, for fear of embarrassing your family and their friends."
Short and sweet. Easily a 5*
Some of the things stated in this book, cultural/behavioral or otherwise material, are probably already untrue or becoming untrue. Most however are still applicable - often surprisingly so, thus it is astounding how slowly Japan changes - and made me LOL.
I love the tone of voice used by the writer; very matter-of-fact laced with passive aggressive sarcasms reminiscent of someone, perhaps a Japanese someone, who has had enough of Japan.
Some examples:
"Sex with high-school girls is in such demand that some older women dress up in school uniform."
"So it's probably best not to die in the final three months of the year, for fear of embarrassing your family and their friends."
Short and sweet. Easily a 5*
April 14, 2019
Great, fun start for your learnings about Japan
Great way to start being acquainted to the enormous vastness of the Japanese culture, people, country, etc.
The typical style of "Xenophobe's guide" softens the blow of how tough these people are to understand and follow. Nevertheless, if you need to really learn Japanese business or culture, better keep going with more serious books.
Great way to start being acquainted to the enormous vastness of the Japanese culture, people, country, etc.
The typical style of "Xenophobe's guide" softens the blow of how tough these people are to understand and follow. Nevertheless, if you need to really learn Japanese business or culture, better keep going with more serious books.
June 24, 2019
As far as I can tell, this is an accurate description of the Japanese society. It is possible that recent shifts in the demographics and openness to the world will diminish the accuracy of these prejudices. However, for now, I think this is a good short introduction to how the Japanese live and seem to the outside world.
June 2, 2025
There is no nuance in this book. It feels a little bit like the people who wrote it do not really like Japanese culture and just have a negative opinion about everyday Japanese life. That said it dies help someone who doesn’t understand Japanese culture to get a general understanding of things you encounter in daily life.
February 11, 2018
Brief, superficial, but fun
February 15, 2018
Acid short read plagued with cliches and topics from Japanese and the Japanese culture, likely to steal a laugh or two.
March 7, 2021
Informativa si uneori comica insa nici pe departe la fel de buna ca volumele despre englezi si francezi.
Read
February 20, 2022I enjoy all the Xenophobe’s Guides for a quick and numerous glance at a specific nationality, and this one is no exception. Fun, short, and enlightening.
July 13, 2025
Informative in a very informal way and hilarious
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews